Literacy Now

Having a hard time focusing? Finding it difficult to stay in your seat? I'm just talking about teachers...forget about the students! This has always been the time of year where the routines of the day were both my best friend and my worst enemy. They were my best friend because my classroom ran like a well-oiled machine. Despite countless interruptions, meetings, and the inevitable spring fever, we were able to stay (mostly) on track. But, at the same time, these routines made the day feel so...ho-hum.

I have seriously rethought our independent reading habits over the last few weeks, trying to find something to give a new life to this essential part of our day. Yes, students are reading—and reading well—but are they loving it? Is there excited chatter about books? Are there groans when it's time to stop reading?

Here are a few ideas to pump up independent reading and turn spring fever into reading fever:

• Add two-minute book talks. I stole this one right from the great Donalyn Miller. Once or twice a week, right before dismissal, students take two minutes to "sell" a new favorite to the rest of the class. Now, this could quickly become a real drag if teachers slap a formula or rubric on this activity (put that graphic organizer down!). But, after a little modeling, and when kept fresh and casual, these two minutes have served to get more kids excited about what book is up next in their reading lives.
• Take a "shelfie." Although the idea of students posing for selfies and posting them on social media makes me cringe, posting a shelfie makes me want to jump up and down with nerdy joy. Ask students to pose alongside a set of books that are favorites or a stack of books that represent those texts that are in their “to read next” piles. Students don't even have to appear in the photo if you'd prefer. Post shelfies in your classroom and let them work their magic.
• Set a class reading goal. Work with your students to set a goal for the number of books you plan to read over the next three or four weeks. Ask students to keep track of their reading and create a bulletin board or chart to map the class's progress over time. Celebrate small successes and quickly set a new goal.
• Give students a voice. Instead of selecting your next chapter book read-aloud for the class, read aloud the first chapter or two from a handful of books over the next week. Then, allow the class to vote on the book the class will complete. Have copies of the contenders on hand so students who get excited about any of the books have access to them right away.
• Breathe new life into your classroom library. You don't need to spend millions at your local bookshop, but breathing new life into your classroom library can create big buzz around the room. Exchange books with a colleague to get some different titles in your room. Hit a garage sale. Put together a DonorsChoose.org request. Spend those Scholastic bonus points. Switch up your displays. Put out a new basket. Whatever! Then make the reveal a big classroom event celebrating books.

Mrs. Mimi, aka Jennifer Scoggin, is a teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of Be Fabulous: The Reading Teacher's Guide to Reclaiming Your Happiness in the Classroom and It's Not All Flowers and Sausages: My Adventures in Second Grade, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

As a librarian, I do a little bit of everything to keep students engaged—magic and science tricks, booktalking titles, book giveaways, singing songs, and, of course, reading aloud.
Often, however, these things do not happen inside the library walls. To make a public library, like the one I work for, a true part of the community, we have to go out into the community.

Community outreach can be one of the most complicated parts of being a public librarian. How do you find time in your already stretched schedule to do outreach? Is outreach even that important on top of everything else your library provides? And yet community outreach, making connections with your community outside your library walls, can also be one of the most rewarding parts of public librarianship.

I know it’s not always easy, but even in small ways, you can reach out to your community and start making connections. When my staff participates in outreach, we not only build a connection to the library but also help create a culture of reading and literacy in our whole community. 

Looking for some ways to increase your community outreach and start building stronger partnerships within your community?  Here are a few ways to start:

• Find out when your local schools are having parent events or fairs. Organizers are almost always receptive to allowing community organizations to have booths or stations at events like this. If you don’t have staff to attend one of these events, ask if you can drop off brochures or bookmarks with information about your library and its programs. These are a great way to connect with community members who might not regularly make it through library doors, and it also positions you (and the library) as a source for literacy education.
• Let outreach come to you! Reach out into your community and invite people in. Every month, I e-mail local elementary teachers of a specific grade and ask them to come for tours. This is a great chance for teachers to visit, and it takes the pressure off you and staff being out of the building. Tours also help to establish the library as a welcoming place for the whole community to grow and learn.
• Find and network with a group of local community educators. Building community engagement with the library can start with something as simple as finding your community of like-minded educators. There are often groups of community educators who meet to network and share information. In my town, community educators meet once a month, giving us a chance to touch base without a big time investment. Informal educators groups can be well worth your time—consider organizing one. Doing so might take a lot of time to set up, but once you establish a group the payoff is more than worth it. Our community educators group has representatives from our museum, historical society, nature center, art center, and local National Park. Creating a group and leading a group as a librarian can be another way to develop new partnerships, bring outreach into the library, and position your library as a leader in education.    

I know outreach isn’t always possible for libraries with limited budgets and staff. But if you look for chances in your community to be present when you can and take all the chances you can to invite your community into your library, outreach can become more feasible. Outreach, though it often takes time and scheduling creativity, makes your library and staff an active part of the literary growth and continuing education of your community. And isn’t that worth it?

Angie Manfredi is the Head of Youth Services for the Los Alamos County Library System in Los Alamos, NM. She loves when children shout “LIBRARY LADY!” at her in the grocery store and is dedicated to literacy, education, and every kid’s right to read what he or she wants. You can read more of her writing on her blog, Fat Girl Reading, or find her on Twitter.

With the increasing focus placed on informational and narrative texts, the teaching of reading poetry often becomes something like a month-long spring fling. We feel the relegation of poetry to second-tier status is most unfortunate and denies teachers and students unique opportunities for joyous and productive reading. This post describes five student-centered and practical ways to give poetry a more central role in your curriculum all year long.

Poetry Builds Foundational Reading Skills

The Common Core State Standards identify word recognition and reading fluency as foundational literacy competencies essential for close reading. Poetry is well suited for teaching both word recognition and fluency.

A powerful way to teach word recognition is through word families or rhymes. A word family is the part of a syllable that shares a vowel and following consonants. For example, the words back, track, and stack contain the word family –ack;  the words sight, bright, and fright contain the word family –ight. Word families are a more efficient and consistent way to decode words because the set of letters in a word family is processed as one unit. Word families can help readers decode a multitude of words. Most poems for children rhyme, which means the texts can provide students with authenticity for reading selected word families (e.g., Star light, star bright…).

Repeated readings of short texts are an effective way to develop two key components of fluency: automaticity in word recognition and expression in oral reading. Poems and songs are meant to be performed and rehearsed orally, often for an audience. Rehearsal is an authentic form of repeated reading where students practice a text several times, not to read it fast, but to read it with meaningful expression. The textual patterns, rhythm, rhyme, and often the melody of poems and songs make them quite easy to remember. How many of us recall the words to a poem or song we learned decades ago? The growth of a strong sight-word vocabulary is another foundational reading competency that immersing children in poetry develops.

1. Poetry Notebooks. Invite students to keep a poetry notebook all year long. Teach one or two poems per week. Enjoy rereading using echo reading, reading in funny voices, or assigning stanzas to groups. Students return to their poetry notebooks all year long!

2. Word Catchers. Invite students to select words from the poetry to act out, add to the word wall, or study as a class.

Poetry Builds Deep Comprehension Competencies

Poetry helps students engage in the deep or close reading that CCSS indicates is essential to proficient reading comprehension. Close reading requires students to read a text more than once, but for different purposes.

Poetry is rich with interesting and unusual words, figurative language, imagery, simile, metaphor, and more. Students can reread a poem multiple times, focusing on a particular feature of the poem or purpose for reading. Each reading becomes a new reading experience leading students to deeper understandings of—and appreciation for—the poem. We have found poetry is particularly well suited for implementing the reciprocal teaching strategies of predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. The brevity of most poems permits students to employ the strategy with each new reading.

3. Reciprocal Teaching/Close Reading. Employ reciprocal teaching as you reread poems. First, skim the poem to predict. Read once through to enjoy. Then invite students to reread to mark the text to clarify words or phrases and to question the author. Finally, summarize the poem.

Joyous Reading

Above all, poetry and other rhythmical texts are fun to read. Both of us have wonderful memories of reading and reciting poetry and songs, individually and with classmates, in our elementary classrooms. Children find the textual patterns, rhythm, rhyme, melody, and alliteration as well as the whimsy and humor often embedded in poetry so appealing. We enjoy watching the delight children take in reading and performing poetry and songs as we see their heads, and their bodies, bob, sway, and weave to the rhythm in language. The brevity and rhythmical nature of poems make them easy to learn. Even the child who struggles mightily in reading informational texts can find pleasure and success in reading poetry.

4. Lucky Listeners. Provide a copy of a poem to take home to read to at least three “lucky listeners,” who might include the dog, a baby sibling, or a grandparent over the phone.

5. Poetry Break. Surprise your students by giving them a “poetry break.” Stephen Layne suggests announcing poetry break! while passing out poetry books (and maybe snacks) so students can enjoy 10 minutes of poetry reading.

As Lee Bennett Hopkins once mused, “Poetry is so many things to so many people.” When you make poetry an essential part of your reading curriculum, children thrive!

Lori D. Oczkus is a literacy coach, author, and popular speaker across the United States. Lori has extensive experience as a bilingual elementary teacher, intervention specialist working with struggling readers, and staff developer and literacy coach. Her most recent book with IRA is Just the Facts! Close Reading and Comprehension of Informational Text. Timothy Rasinski, a literacy education professor at Kent State University, is a prolific researcher who has authored more than 150 articles. His research interests include reading fluency and word study. He is a former coeditor of The Reading Teacher and is currently coeditor of the Journal of Literacy Research.

We stand firm in our belief that differentiated instruction can provide equitable and effective instruction and learning opportunities for all students—gifted students, preschoolers, English learners, and struggling readers. We also believe differentiated instruction provides opportunities for building teachers’ caring relationships with their students and promotes responsiveness to students’ interests and learning trajectories.

Differentiated instruction is particularly powerful when embedded in rich learning contexts that address persistent gaps in literacy achievement between racial groups, and more-and less-advantaged students. Such contexts offer differentiated pathways for achieving learning goals for all students.

Differentiated instruction is not a skill-and-drill approach that attempts to “fill in the gaps” that, on the surface, seem to be contributing to learning difficulties. Instead, differentiated instruction teaches explicitly a wide array of skills, concepts, and strategies, often simultaneously, while leveraging students’ prior knowledge, learning and cultural histories, and linguistic differences.

Leveraging students’ prior knowledge and histories provides a conceptual foundation for acquiring new knowledge and accessing academic knowledge.

Differentiation gives students access to the same curriculum and learning assignments as their peers. At the root of differentiated instruction, then, is the recognition of students’ strengths and differences and teaching to both. Such instruction counters attempts to close potential gaps between students’ abilities and school performance by reducing the curriculum to a basic set of skills (often taught in isolation or without sufficient application) that can delay access to rich sources of information as needed for concept development and academic learning.

To be effective, differentiated instruction is situated in and designed to be responsive to the curricular and instructional goals, students’ capabilities and needs, and community and parent input.

Guided by continuous and multiple student assessments, instruction engages learning in mixed-ability grouping assignments, guided reading and writing opportunities, use of multiple texts (including digital texts) to scaffold other texts to afford access to new knowledge, and explicit instruction focusing on concept development, strategic word learning and text comprehension, and generative writing, among other literacy skills and knowledge areas.

Teachers who have differentiated the content, process, or products for the diversity of students in their classroom have seen improvements in students’ spelling development, letter-word reading, vocabulary development, comprehension, fluency, and reading engagement through instruction planned in coordination with literacy specialists, supported by administrators, and aligned with literacy instruction provided within the classroom.

Excellent reading instruction includes creating classrooms that optimize learning opportunities for every child. Every day teachers strive to optimize learning opportunities and provide equitable instruction based upon the cultural backgrounds of their students.

Supporting their efforts and documenting their successes places students front and center—where they belong.

Doris Walker-Dalhouse is a past member of the ILA Boardof Directors and current member of the Specialized Literacy Professionals SIG. She is a literacy professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Victoria J. Risko is a past president of ILA and current president of the Specialized Literacy Professionals SIG. She is a professor emerita of language, literacy, and culture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Thousands of people across the United States gathered last month in cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The zodiac animal symbolizing this year is yang in Mandarin, which can mean sheep, goat, or ram. There has been a lot of discussion about the English translation. The English translation varies, scholars say, depending on the context and the lifestyle in different areas of the world, illustrating the richness and complexity of this holiday and how it is celebrated differently by people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

National Center for Education Statistics projects that by 2023 the percentage of White students in public school enrollment will decrease to less than half, whereas Hispanics are projected to constitute 30% and Asian/Pacific Islanders 5% of the enrollment. That means more than half of our students in public schools will come from a family where two or more languages are spoken and holidays from two or more cultures are celebrated. In response to this trend of shifting student demographics, teachers need to adjust their teaching to be culturally relevant. Still, we seem to add just a few “multicultural” books to our libraries and overlook the richness in English learners’ diverse life experiences and continue to view these students from a deficit perspective.

A few years ago, I met “Johnny,” a new student in a public school. Johnny’s family came from Southeast China and had just moved to a Midwest town. Johnny’s parents worked in a local Chinese restaurant and did not speak much English. New to the class, Johnny was considered “behind” on the basis of a reading test and needed extra English language learning. On the basis of my observation of the class, Johnny appeared very shy and lacked confidence. A wonderful opportunity to engage him presented itself when the class was about to have a cultural lesson on the Lunar New Year; however, Johnny and his parents were not invited to be involved in the lesson preparation or implementation.

This experience brought to mind the concept of “funds of knowledge,” created by Luis C. Moll and other scholars: knowledge and skills that are developed historically, socially, and culturally in individuals and households. Johnny’s family possessed rich experiences and knowledge about Lunar New Year, which would have made the lesson on the festival more relevant and authentic for his classmates. However, their funds of knowledge went unnoticed and were obscured by the predominant, deficit view that Johnny was behind and his parents did not speak much English.

In that same class, there were two students of Korean background, for whom Lunar New Year is also a major festival. I cannot help wondering what it might have been like if Johnny, his Korean peers, and all of their parents were given the opportunity to share how the festival was celebrated at their homes. They could have shared their New Year traditions by showing artifacts, preparing traditional food, and telling stories of past celebrations. Perhaps Johnny would be willing to show his hong bao (lucky money in red envelope) and tell the class its meaning and significance. To celebrate linguistic diversity, they could have taught the class New Year greetings in Korean and Mandarin. The other students in Johnny’s class could have experienced a Lunar New Year cultural lesson far more memorable in addition to reading multicultural picture books, such as Sam and the Lucky Money by Karen Chinn or New Clothes for New Year's Day by Hyun-Joo Bae.

Moreover, these children could have come to appreciate the funds of knowledge inherent in their classmates from different backgrounds, thereby building a more inclusive, stronger classroom community. In this way, student diversity may become as strength for teaching and learning.

In addition to “meeting the needs” of English learners, it is also time to purposefully invite students of diversity and their families to the classroom stage. We may be surprised by the content and the spark they will bring to our teaching and learning environment.

Hsiao-Chin Kuo is an assistant professor in Literacy Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. She has a Master’s degree in TESOL and a PhD in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education. Her research interests include multimodality and multiple literacies, literacy and language education for linguistic and cultural diversities, and partnership between school, home and communities.